Foresight Nanotech Institute Weekly News Digest: September 12, 2007

Deadline September 17

Deadline this Monday, September 17: Register by this date to save $100 on the Productive Nanosystems Conference. Save an additional $200 by joining as a Foresight member! Contact us for special registration code.

Save the dates!

Mark these dates! The 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend will be held November 3-4 in Silicon Valley, California. This year we are experimenting with the highly popular "Unconference" format. Special thanks to Yahoo! for donating their conference center as our venue. Watch this space for more information as the event comes together.

Temporary format change

The format of the News Digest has temporarily changed to accommodate Foresight schedule changes. Instead of our usual news categories, we bring you a sample of our popular Nanodot blog posts from the preceding week. Our usual format will return shortly.
—Jim Lewis, editor

Foresight Events

Conference sponsored by Foresight Nanotech Institute and Society of Manufacturing Engineers with support from Battelle
October 9-10, 2007
DoubleTree Crystal City in Arlington, VA

Now, for the first time, the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems will describe the R&D pathways and products resulting from this ultimate technological revolution. Join us as we explore the power of advanced "bottom-up" nanotechnology in this 14th Foresight Conference on Advanced Nanotechnology.

Do you believe that nanotechnology will give society the ability to tackle the hard challenges facing humanity? What's your priority for nanotechnology: cancer treatments and longevity therapies, sustainable energy, clean water, a restored environment, space development, or "zero waste" manufacturing? Or perhaps there are potential nanotech scenarios you would like to prevent.

If you would like to help influence the direction of this powerful technology, please consider becoming a member of Foresight Nanotech Institute. With your support, Foresight will continue to educate the general public on beneficial nanotechnology and what it will mean to our society.

Members receive the Foresight Nanotech Update newsletter. For a sample from the archives, see the overview of environmental aspects of nanotech: "The development of nanotechnology provides increasingly precise and comprehensive control over the structure of matter at the molecular scale, affording many opportunities to heal and preserve the environment. Eventually molecular manufacturing will provide consumer goods inexpensively and efficiently, and without generating harmful waste products or consuming scarce resources." Join Foresight and help steer nanotech in the directions you personally support most!

Foresight Event

Mark your calendars for this very special event. Please join us to explore nanotechnology, AI, longevity, social technologies like Prediction Markets, and other coming technologies.

We've learned that you want a highly interactive meeting, so this year we'll be experimenting with a new format including big chunks of time for the Unconference meeting style that is taking the technical world by storm.

We have a firm limit of 200 participants. The website and Wiki are coming soon. Reserve your place now by sending your name and email address to foresight@foresight.org. We'll let you know when registration is open!

Nanodot: A sample from Foresight's blog

Researcher Alexander Wissner-Gross let us know of his and advisor Efthimios Kaxiras's work at Harvard on modeling how to enable stable, very thin ice layers at body temperature. They modeled ice sitting on a layer of sodium attached to diamond, and sure enough, it's doesn't melt. It's speculated that such an ice layer might make diamond-toughened medical implants more biocompatible, but even if that doesn't work, it's a cool result (pun intended).

For those of you with an interest in the longer-term, more visionary projections for nanotech and the human body, Gina Miller brings to our attention a new collaboration between herself and Robert Freitas, a 2007 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology finalist.

Babak Parviz of University of Washington, named by Technology Review as one of this year's outstanding innovators under the age of 35, writes in the Sept/Oct issue (free reg. req'd.) about self-assembly:

"…This revolutionary manufacturing method offers many opportunities. Growing machines may not be as far-fetched as it once seemed."

Contact Foresight

The Foresight Nanotech Institute Weekly News Digest is emailed every week to 15,000 individuals in more than 125 countries. Foresight Nanotech Institute is a member-supported organization. We offer membership levels appropriate to meet the needs and interests of individuals and companies. To find out more about membership, follow this link:http://www.foresight.org/members/index.html

Dr. James Lewis, Research Analyst at Foresight Nanotech Institute, is the editor of the Foresight Nanotech Institute Weekly News Digest. If you would like to submit a news item or contact him with comments about the News Digest, please send an email to editor@foresight.org

Foresight Nanotech Institute is located in Menlo Labs, part of Menlo Business Park in the Palo Alto, California area. If you are seeking space for your nanotechnology or biotechnology company, please contact them and tell them you heard about them through Foresight.
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